iris van Herpen's Dreamscape
By Maya Lucinda Langridge
Iris van Herpen’s breakthrough spring collection in 2011 named ‘Escapism’ exploded and stretched the boundaries of haute couture, reverberating into our contemporary moment. ‘Escapism’ unfolds a couture dreamscape, tracing the departure from mundane reality into extreme fantasy. Pioneering the integration of rapid prototyping (3-D printing) in her designs, van Herpen worked closely with the architect Daniel Widrig and created avant-garde, sculptural, and seductive pieces for her audience.
Inspired by the emergence of the addictive digital age, her designs are strikingly inorganic, sharp, technological, and draw upon associations with the grotesque. Paradoxically, and what I love most, the garments appear tangible — intimately sculpted to the model’s body and part of her physicality. The silhouettes themselves perform a living architecture as van Herpen fuses primordial natural processes and rhythms with digitized fantasy: featuring exoskeleton shapes, sound waves, swan-like heads, wings, cocooning forms, camera lenses, and futuristic textures.
The continuing vision of van Herpen encircles the metamorphoses and fluid anatomy of the human body. She writes that her emerging interest in fashion as a young designer stemmed from her early career as a classical ballet dancer: ‘Those years of dance taught me so much about my body, the transformation of movement, the evolution of shape, and how to manipulate both shape and movement. … I am now able to transform this kinaesthetic knowledge into new forms and materiality.’
"The Body is not isolated, but as an ecosystem — where fashion becomes alive, responsive, and deeply connected with the natural world’
Van Herpen’s work is inspired by the iconic movement of the dancer Loïe Fuller, a visionary of modern dance in the late 19th century as she experimented with fabric in motion and the shapes which one could draw with the body. ‘She seems to be in dialogue with the forces of nature in her performances. In my eyes she was an alchemist of movement, light, and fabric, with which she merged dance into sculpture,’ the designer says.
Van Herpen presented her most recent collection ‘Sympoiesis’ at Paris Haute Couture Week in July 2025. Van Herpen created, in collaboration with biodesigner Chris Bellamy, a living look: a garment inhabited by ‘125 million bioluminescent algae which emit light in response to movement.’
The Pyrocystis Lunula algae, moulded into a membrane on the garment, was cultivated over months in sea-water pools in conditions which mirrored their natural ocean environment. Van Herpen is fascinated by the relationship of symbiosis, and articulates her use of biodesign as ‘a collaboration with nature itself’. ‘Sympoesis’ is conceptually framed by the ecology of oceanic life during our era of ecological emergency, biodiversity loss, and a magnitude of human wreckage.
The collection, van Herpen says, ‘[views] the body not as isolated, but as an ecosystem — where fashion becomes alive, responsive, and deeply connected with the natural world’. Van Herpen’s collection is a spectacle of aquatic motion and dreamlike sensory flow, as she translates water onto fabric. The pieces are designed with translucent Japanese airfabric and resin that undulate with movement, suspended by bonings laser-cut from weightless carbon fibre, mimicking liquidised forms, tidal rhythms, and amorphous marine organisms. Van Herpen reimagines haute couture fashion in our present moment not merely as a fantasy of escapism, but as a wide biospheric consciousness: a dreamscape which necessarily incorporates the natural world.